In the information age, one of the most significant challenges facing business is the management of ever increasing amounts of information across increasingly complex and varied environments. As the competitive environment in which the business operates expands across the globe, the speed and ease of access to this information becomes critical. From a storage and processing standpoint, significant advances in computing hardware, including computer memory and computer processors, have kept pace with the increasing amounts of information required in day-to-day business operations. However, these advances in computing hardware are in part responsible for the increasingly complex and varied environments in which the information is found.
One reason that a variety of platforms are used to store and process data is that as business expands and competition increases, control is decentralized so that decisions can be made quickly by each business entity using local information. As a result of the decentralization of the business decision making process, the mainframe processors, previously the only platform on which to handle high volume information processing, are downsized to or integrated with local minicomputers and workstations. Along with the local minicomputers and workstations come a variety of software tools specific to that platform to assist in the processing of information.
Localized processing capability generally means even more information is generated but, the additional information and local changes to existing information may not be available throughout other areas of the business system.
One solution is to simply duplicate all information across all platforms. This solution, however means wasted resources in that if all of the duplicated information is not needed, the space could have been used to store other information. Also, duplication of information across multiple platforms also means that the information must be updated on each platform. Another solution is to provide access, i.e., though a network, to every other platform. The problem with this solution, however, is that each platform must then know how to operate under the systems of every other platform in order to take advantage of the availability of that platform's information. One platform, for example, may be a minicomputer using an Oracle database and another platform may be a mainframe using IBM's Database 2 (DB2).
What is needed is a method and system for managing access to a plurality of data objects located across a variety of platforms which provides quick, easy access to the information contained therein.